An oak tree uprooted by Thursday night’s thunderstorms fell on top of a home at 254 Lynchfield St., Rockmart, owned by Colt Deems. The house had extensive damage. (Lowell Vickers, NPCo)
Rockmart Fire Department personnel work the scene of a storm damaged home Thursday evening. An oak tree snapped in half and fell on top of a home at 126 Railroad St. No injuries were reported, but the house sustained heavy damage. (Lowell Vickers, thepolkfishwrap.com)
Powerful winds downed dozens of trees, damaged at least two homes and left up to half the city without electrical power.
More than 4,100 outages were reported initially, but by late Friday afternoon all but about 40 customers had service, according to Georgia Power.
Workers were still trying to restore power to customers in the Atlanta area, where more than 20,000 remained without power Friday evening, Georgia Power said.
Update: At 9 a.m. Friday, Rockmart still had 293 customers without power. Crews are working to have it restored by midnight, said Carol Boatwright, Georgia Power spokeswoman
Posted earlier: A thunderstorm pushed through Rockmart Thursday evening with powerful winds that downed dozens of trees, damaged at least two homes and left up to half the city without electrical power.
Visit the polkfishwrap to see a photo gallery of storm damage in Rockmart.
Rockmart Fire Chief Todd Queen said the storm, which swept through before 7:25 p.m., caused extensive damage to the city’s electrical grid.
“We have lines snapped in two, transformers dangling from poles, trees on lines,” Queen said. “Fortunately, we don’t have any reports of injuries.”
Although two reports of funnel clouds were made to Polk County 911 Thursday – one a few minutes before the storm hit Rockmart, and one report about an hour afterward – the storm damage in Rockmart was not being attributed to a tornado.
About 4,000 Rockmart area customers were without power late Thursday and it was not known when power would be restored, Georgia Power officials said.
“Whatever it was, it cut a path from southwest to northeast right across the city,” Queen said. “We have numerous trees downed, lots of limbs on the ground and we’ve had to close some roads and side streets.”
Two houses were extensively damaged by felled oak trees. One, at 126 Railroad St., was partially crushed when an oak tree snapped in two, with the top of the tree coming to rest on top of the house.
Also damaged was the home of Colt Deems, 254 Lynchfield St., in the Goodyear Village neighborhood of Rockmart. The tree was completely uprooted by the wind and fell across the house. Deems said the living room had extensive damage.
“We had several years of drought and the roots have moved up trying to get water,” Lynchfield Street resident James Black said. “The trees are top heavy. It doesn’t take much to push them over.”
All the oaks were planted at the same time, between 1929 and 1930 when Goodyear Tire and Rubber created the neighborhood in what had been a cotton field. The neighborhood originally was built as rental housing for the tire plant’s employees.
The front that moved through the area dropped more than a half an inch of rain on Floyd County on Thursday.
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